(a) reported tobacco's cost to the nation as over $120 billion, triple the then estimate, thus led the way for the Attorney General litigation, see "Are You Missing $omething?" 26 Smoke Signals 4 (Oct 1980);

Ahead of any health issue, cigarettes constitute a mind-altering drug, cause abulia, and are in essence delivery mechanisms for the original "rape drug." The result is foreseeable—90% of criminals are smokers, started on that drug-crime path by the gateway (starter) drug.

A. Modern cigarettes are a Confederate product. Cigarettes' toxic chemicals impair self-defense, impulse, and ethical controls (the term is abulia). Cigarettes are the delivery agent for nicotine, the dangerous gateway (starter) drug on which children are first hooked (average age 12). Alcohol follows, average age 12.6; then marijuana, average age 14. See:

the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) book, Research on Smoking Behavior, Research Monograph 17, page vi; Fleming, et al., "The Role of Cigarettes in The Initiation And Progression Of Early Substance Use," 14 Addictive Behaviors 261-272 (1989); and the Department of Health and Human Services book, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People: A Report of the Surgeon General (1994). Page 10 warns that "Illegal sales of tobacco products are common."

B. Once the foregoing abulic mind-altering process occurs, tobacco's role in crime results. This role has been cited many times by law enforcement officials, judges, and doctors since the Auburn Report (1854), e.g., by Jackson, 1854; Hodgkin, 1857; Ellis, 1901; Lindsay, 1914; Torrance, 1916; Brum, 1924; Danis, 1925; Healy and Bonner, 1926; Crane, Dawson, Pollock, and Shaw, 1931; Wood, 1944, etc. America-hating Confederates enraged by Civil War defeat wanted to kill Yankees and re-enslave blacks. They saw the tobacco-crime link, and that tobacco makes an ideal chemical warfare weapon. They altered the tobacco formula to increase its abulia-causing power. The result is foreseeable:

"Nowhere is the practice of smoking more imbedded than in the nation's prisons and jails, where the proportion of smokers to non-smokers is many times higher than that of society in general." Doughty v Board, 731 F Supp 423, 424 (D Col, 1989).

As cigarettes' toxic chemicals cause abulia, acalculia, and anosognosia, impairing impulse and ethical controls, most crime is committed by smokers.

C. The Confederate goal is killing more Yankees yearly as in the entire Civil War (360,000). The out-of-uniform Confederates known as cigarette sellers, target minorities to sell disproportionately to them. See Klonoff, Landrine, and Alcarez, "An Experimental Analysis of Sociocultarial Variables in sales of Cigarettes to Minors," 87 Am J Pub Health 823-826 (May 1997), and the 1998 Surgeon General Report. So it is mostly black smokers in prison. We need to severely criminalize this discriminatory process.

III.Rebutting the Myth That TobaccoCompanies Don't Want Children to Smoke

Tobacco ads target children to replace the 3,000 of their best customers killed every day, as 1998 Warren City Council President James Fouts says, "to find replacements for the adults they lose due to tobacco-related illnesses." Tobacco company intent/action when unrestrained by law is shown by this pre-restraint example of smoking: 30% of 6 year old boys; 50% of "boys between 9 and 10"; 88% of boys over 11. See Dixon, On Tobacco, 17 Canadian Med Ass'n J 1531 (Dec 1927).

(Due to acalculia, impairment of mathematical comprehension and reactivity, and due to abulia, impairment of willpower, and self-defense, impulse
and ethical controls—lay word is "addiction"—and due to anosognosia, lack of comprehension of their impairments, smokers cannot understand the danger that these numbers depict, in effect, going far above the chemicals' "speed limit.")

Cigarettes have long been adulterated with coumarin, rat poison, from trilisa odoratissima plants. "[I]t is largely used as an adulterant of smoking tobacco . . . [for its intoxicating, addicting effect]. Hence . . . cigarette-smoking . . . is assuming the proportions of a great national evil." Laurence Johnson, M.D., A Manual of the Medical Botany of North America (NY: William Wood & Co, 1884), pp 170-1. The 1897 Tennessee law upheld in Austin v State, supra, was thereafter passed.

"It] has been used commercially for many years—mainly in cigarettes . . . harvest of [it] is expanding . . . The composition of one flavoring extract that includes [it] was patented in 1961. . . . About two million pounds of cured plants are harvested annually. . . . Because [it] is a perennial and the roots are not harvested, maintaining populations is not a problem. A decrease in plant populations has not been noted." Source: Krochmal, Trilisa odoratissima, 23 Econ Bot 185-6 (1969).

In one of the cigarette litigation cases, Mike Moore, Attorney General ex rel State of Mississippi v American Tobacco Co, et al, No 94-1429, Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D., an ex-tobacco company scientist, admitted coumarin (rat poison) in tobacco. See Philip Hilts, Smoke Screen: The Truth Behind The Tobacco Industry Cover-Up (NY: Addison-Wesley Pub Co, 1996), pp 161-163. Flouting the above public domain data, tobacco company attorney Thomas Bezanson objected, not as untrue, but "on trade secret grounds." Such attorney concealment appears to be obstruction of justice, attorney misconduct, to fraudulently conceal the fact of the data having long been published and in the public domain.

"Over 37 million people (one of every six Americans alive today) will die from cigarette smoking years before they otherwise would." See U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare book, Research on Smoking Behavior, Research Monograph 17, DHEW Publication ADM 78-581, page v (Dec 1977). Such deaths are "natural and probable consequences," a term defined in Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed (St. Paul: West Pub Co, 1990), page 1026. Deaths from cigarettes' deleteriousness occur so frequently as to be expected to happen again and again, hence meet the definition. "Cigarette Makers Get Away With Murder," says Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc.D., The Detroit News, p 4B (14 Mar 1993).

Our deleterious cigarette ban MCL § 750.27, MSA § 28.216, follows the wise nineteenth century concept of criminalizing fraudulent sales, snake-oil sales, etc., not the buying. The concept was that criminalizing buying and use makes too many criminals, promotes disrespect for law, and punishes the victim of the fraudulent sale. This is especially true with children, below the age of maturity and consent to even make contract decisions. We criminalize leaving one's refrigerator outside with the lock on (MCL§ 750.493d, MSA § 28.761(4)), not the unsuspecting children who fall prey to it. By banning the gateway drug, not a post-gateway drug such as alcohol, MCL § 750.27, MSA § 28.216, avoids the error of Prohibition, and puts personal responsibility on those with most knowledge of the contraband substance (manufacturers and sellers), not on unwary consumers, often children. Michigan's well-reasoned law is an example for the nation.

TCPG supports enforcing current penalties, and increasing them, for selling cigarettes, making it a felony with penalties like those for other poisonings of people, others' out-of-uniform killing civilians, and specifically a penalty greater than for the drugs that kill fewer people, e.g., crack cocaine, heroin, the mild "rape drug," etc., all pursuant to the precedents that the penalty should be life in prison for poisoning people.

RELATED INFORMATION

Governor John Engler and his staff have been supportive and are trying to halt cigarette smuggling, issuing five memoranda on the subject.